Community

Mailing list & forum

There's also an OSM mailing list for talking about Finland specific subjects, as well as own area in OSM forum

People involved

On a typical day about 25-35 people are editing OSM map of Finland.

OSM activity: September 8, 2009

In a typical Finnish way the mappers are mostly mapping and not so much talking about it. However, some users have introduced themselves on OSM users page. Total number of Finnish OSM mappers is considerably bigger. By 11th August, 2008, the Finnish excerpt of OSM database contained edits from 384 distinct user names. By 7th November 2008 the number was 471 and 3rd May 2009 616 (12. 6. 2009: 662;18. 8. 2009: 794;15. 10. 2009: 1022;28. 4. 2010: 1301;22. 11. 2010: 1648).

IRC

Other

Goals

If you have a goal that you are working towards or one that you would like to see get done (and are maybe willing to get the ball rolling) then add it to the list here, create a section where it can be coordinated and tracked, and a way of measuring progress. And then get on with it :-)

Quality assurance tools

Features and tagging guidelines

Editing notes

Set your home location in map view user settings so others can find you

Use the article discussion page for any kind of commenting/rfc, let's try to keep this page clean of that

If you make mistakes, fix them immediately. or...

Feel free to make mistakes. The most common mistake you can make is to to fail to make any OpenStreetMap edits!

Always tag with correct tags, don't use wrong tags just to get something rendered (Tagging for the renderer) If you would like something to get rendered that's not, file a bug report on trac.

Use the JOSM validator plugin to check your edits

Do not give road tags for nodes, but only for roads.

POIs are good. Add as many as you like.

Add both fi (name, name:fi) and sv (name:sv) street names if they exists

Set road number (ref=, int_ref=) if you know it

Set postal code/zip code (postal_code=) if you know it

You can still set is_in (is_in=Suburb, City, Country) tag for POIs and street

No need to add it to all nodes, just to named entities that can be listed as search results: "Kirkkokatu in Helsinki, Kirkkokatu in Tampere"

In the end we'd like to have all area borders entered as closed ways and could drop the is_in altogether

Do NOT blindly trust aerial images when editing. Good GPS tracks are more accurate than poor satellite images and there is no need to move the roads other users have already drawn on the map just to make them match the imagery (unless you really know that the imagery in that region is "spot on" accurate).

When tracing roads - particularly winding, rural ones - you should add enough points to make each curve look like a curve. Don't just put one or two points per bend. Remember, you are drawing a map, not just a routing diagram.

Maximum lengths, heights and heavy traffic restrictions would be nice, where present. These are still missing for most part.

Coastlines

Coastlines are ways with the tag natural=coastline. They can be imported from an external source. This already done for the whole mainland coastline, but not for all the islands. After import, the coastlines have to be "fixed up" manually, checking that there are no gaps in the ways, duplicate nodes must be merged, and all line segments must be turned so that the water is on the right hand side (i.e. counter-clockwise for islands). Around Helsinki and Turku, some coastlines have been drawn manually in JOSM or Potlatch (or really old stuff in Java Applet).

Old notes

I ran the coastline import script for Vaasa/Kokkola (more specifically, area from 63° 21° to 64° 24°), and now believe it was very bad idea, the amount of islands (and as such, required manual fixing since each one of them has the segments in wrong direction) along the Finnish coast is staggering, and I do not recommend running the coastline import for anyone else until it has been significantly improved. --Juhaz 13:49, 3 May 2007 (BST)

My plan is to import one piece at a time and then fix up the area (close gaps, turn islands right, render in tiles@home) before I go on to import the next part. I'm beginning with the easy parts, such as Latvia and southern Sweden. I have a slightly improved version of the import script that avoids duplicate nodes and doesn't tag nodes and line segments. I have also started to fix up the Vaasa area. It is tedious work, but it can be done. --LA2 08:50, 4 May 2007 (BST)

I created a program which makes it all easy. You can select an area, and it will create an OSM file which you can open in JOSM for further checkings and corrections. The program also checks closes polygons in which direction the segments are arranged. It considers all polygons as islands and turns the direction if necessary. Here you find it: www.lenz-online.de/divers/osm/

Outside urban areas

Outside urban areas the classification is mainly done by looking at the road number; smaller numbers are even officially grouped into few classes. Larger numbers are not signposted, so sometimes one has to make a decision themselves between the values residential/tertiary/unclassified.

Roads in urban areas often have (unposted) numbers in the five digit range, so there's a second table further down for assessing their importance and classification.

Note: some unpaved roads are even tertiary. More signs for choosing between unclassified vs. track at the talk page

N/A

Within urban areas

National highways (road numbers 1-999) often end at the city limits or at least well before the city center but not always there are exceptions to this. Most roads inside built up areas in Finland have official road numbers with four or five digits, but the numbers are seldom signposted. Therefore the classification must follow some other criteria, as outlined below. These criterias are for roads with no numbers, for numbered roads you should always follow the rules in above table. There are some exceptions to these rules as sometimes the numbering does not match with the importance, see the city pages for more information.

Sidewalks are highway=footway, as cycling is forbidden unless signposted otherwise.

Elsewhere mostly cycleways; there's no significant difference between similar ways signposted as "no motorized traffic" or signposted as "Combined pedestrian and cycleway". More examples with pictures below.

Sidewalks and cycleways

Here's a small guide to help us with all the different types of footways and cycleways. Most of these are explained with varying details at, for example, Tag:highway=footway, Tag:highway=cycleway, but the examples here depict how to apply these in the common cases encountered in Finland.

It would be nice if you could also include any of the following tags on cycleways and footways, if known:

Designated for pedestrians and cyclists, and maybe mopedists, or by construction designed mostly for pedestrians and cyclists and maybe mopedists, but with an allowance for motorized vehicle access to properties ("Tontille ajo sallittu")

Laws, regulations, relevant Links

Related news articles

Notes and references

↑The traffic sign "422 Pyörätie" forbids other vehicles from using the section and in some rare cases pedestrians should use such ways - but mostly there's a footway nearby, which the pedestrians should use.